Performing for Pay? The Effects of ‘Merit Pay’ on Motivation in a Public Service

Abstract

Original citation:Marsden, David and Richardson, Ray (1994) Performing for pay? The effects of 'merit pay' on motivation in a public service. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 32 (2). pp. 243-261. ISSN 1467-8543 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.1994.tb01043.x © 1994 This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/4030/ Available in LSE Research Online: January 2016 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. 1Performing for pay? The effects of 'merit pay' on motivation in a public service. David Marsden and Ray RichardsonLondon School of Economics and Centre for Economic Performance 1 Introduction.Performance related pay has been very strongly on the increase in the UK, in both the private and public sectors. In the private sector, where it has long been a feature of managerial pay, it is being extended to a much wider range of occupations. In the public sector too, a large variety of performance related pay systems can be discerned and, over the last few years, they have been extended to practically the whole of the Civil Service.There also seems to be no prospect that the present Government will back-off from performance related pay. Although the extension of the new arrangements may have been somewhat retarded by the 1.5% public sector pay limit in the 1992/3 pay round and the prospective wage bill freeze in 1993/4, the Government has given no public indication of any shift in its view that extending performance related pay is an integral part of its policy of improving public services.Given this, it is only natural to ask whether the recent experiments in performance related pay in the public sector have been successful. This, surprisingly, seems to be a question which has rarely been addressed with any seriousness, whether in the UK (Cannell and Wood 1992, Thompson, 1992), or even in the US, where performance related pay in the Federal civil service has been in use for much longer (Milkovitch and Wigdor, 1991). In particular, although there exist a small number of evaluations of schemes for managerial staff, 2 we know of no evaluation study of PRP for public service non-managerial staff, for whom PRP is a relatively new practice.Despite the growing use made of a whole range of performance related schemes, their true impact remains large...

Integração Entre Valores, Motivação, Comprometimento, Recompensas E Desempenho No Serviço Público

“…Alguns pesquisadores têm examinado atitudes dos empregados em relação à política de incentivo de desempenho (MARSDEN; RICHARDSON, 1994;KELLOUGH;SELDEN, 1997;MAMMAN, 1998). O interesse principal dos pesquisadores concentra-se em como estes sistemas de incentivo afetam a motivação e desempenho dos empregados (KOHN, 1993;MARSDEN;RICHARDSON, 1994;MANOLOPOULOS, 2008).…”

“…O interesse principal dos pesquisadores concentra-se em como estes sistemas de incentivo afetam a motivação e desempenho dos empregados (KOHN, 1993;MARSDEN;RICHARDSON, 1994;MANOLOPOULOS, 2008). Locke et al (1980) argumentam que o dinheiro é um incentivo crucial e que nenhum outro incentivo ou técnica motivacional alcança o valor instrumental do dinheiro.…”

La rémunération au mérite dans le secteur public : bilan des connaissances et avenues de recherche

“…En Angleterre, Marsden et Richardson (1994) ont trouvé que la rémunération au mérite n'a pas les effets attendus sur la motivation des agents dans un centre d'impôts. En effet, si les salariés adhèrent à l'idée de la rému-nération des performances et estiment pouvoir atteindre le niveau de rendement exigé, la plupart considère que l'atteinte de leurs objectifs n'entraîne pas une récom-pense particulière ou entraîne une récompense trop faible pour constituer une incitation suffisante.…”

Performance-related pay and the teaching profession: a review of the literature

“…Marsden and Richardson (1994) found that 26% of their sample of Inland Revenue staff reported that performance-related pay had made them less willing to assist colleagues. A follow-up study by Marsden and French (1998) found that, despite management attempts to deal with some of the earlier disadvantages of the scheme, this percentage had risen to 63%.…”

“…(p.69) There are other public sector jobs with hard to measure outcomes, however, where performancerelated pay has been introduced and its motivational effect observed. Marsden and Richardson (1994) studied the effects of the introduction of performance-related pay into the Inland Revenue and found that staff did not report that their motivation had improved. Asked if performancerelated pay had led them to change in line with a range of objectives such as improve the quality or quantity of their work, work harder or give sustained high performance, a large majority replied negatively.…”